“Getting it Right”: an alternative to the “Systemic Disease” and “Conservative Ideological Bias” of Barker and Mayer’s “Seeing Double”

Abstract

This invited Commentary on Barker and Mayer’s recent paper in this journal, “Seeing Double”, scrutinises the semantics of the authors’ titular metaphor to identify its “systemic disease”, and proposes an alternative of “seeing clearly” by widening the aperture to expose visibility of the whole system. The Commentary first exposes the authors’ purported normativity to amount to a “normative reductive”, as they circumscribe their inquiry within the bounds of shareholder primacy, thus reinforcing status-quo norms and effecting “conservative ideological bias”. The Commentary submits historical-to-contemporary evidence debunking the authors’ “given” of shareholder primacy, noting the persistent existence of legitimate investors with non-pecuniary priorities and hence broader information needs. Even when considering Barker & Mayer's proposed solution for enacting double materiality – namely, applying replacement costs for critical natural capital maintenance due to the fungibility of monetisation as commensurable with traditional financial accounting – the Commentary identifies that this is not the only (nor the best) way to achieve commensurability. A better alternative is to use sustainability performance – in the context of ecological, social and economic sustainability thresholds – as the mechanism of commensurability for bridging the assessment of financial and non-financial impacts. The sustainability performance alternative not only advances a normative approach that “concerns how corporate reporting ‘ought’ to be conceptualised” (to quote Barker and Mayer) without introducing systemic disease or conservative ideological bias but also advances an accounting and reporting practice that “gets it right” (again quoting Barker and Mayer) – a goal that Barker and Mayer inexplicably opt against pursuing.